Bankrate counted 27% of US adults with a side hustle in June 2025, the lowest reading in its series since 2017. Intuit QuickBooks, asking a wider question six months later, counted 47%. Four recent surveys disagree on participation by 20 points and agree on nearly everything else. Below: what each one measured, and the earnings, hours and burnout figures behind the headline numbers. Side Hustle Statistics 27% of US adults said they currently had a side hustle in June 2025, down from 36% ...

ZFS includes inline compression, meaning files are compressed and decompressed on the fly. While you might expect this to reduce IO performance, it’s been proven to improve throughput by reducing the amount of expensive reads required, especially on older spinning drives. Inline compression is wonderful. I don’t need to rotate logs to compressed files. I can temporarily expand virtual disks to raw images without taking up the entire maximum space of the disk. It’s also great for thwart...

About two months ago, I discussed my fitness challenge where the goal was to get below 85.3kg, the oldest measurement I have on record on the scale’s app, starting from 89.6kg. We’re halfway through this challenge, and things got a bit out of hand because, as it’s often the case, I tend to go a bit extreme when I set this type of goal. I hopped on the scale this morning and logged an 81.1kg, which is the lowest weight I have on record since I bought the scale 10 years ago. I don't reme...

The thirteenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out : In Episode 13, I chat with Sophia, the author of Fractal Kitty about, among other things, making interactive web pages about mathematics, the intersection of art, words, and math, the math blogging community, and more. I hope you enjoy the episode! Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. The thirteenth episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out Wonders of Web Weaving ...

It wasn’t until 1959 that any being on Earth saw our Moon’s farside for the first time. Because the Moon is tidally locked to Earth, we only ever see its familiar nearside face. In the early days of space exploration, the Soviet Luna 3 and spacecraft succeeding it transmitted the first lunar farside images . While these captured images at low resolutions by today’s standards, the photos nevertheless revealed a far more cratered hemisphere than the Moon’s nearside. It looked more akin ...

I was watching a Jeopardy from 2004 (The Game Show Channel is rerunning Ken Jennings streak) and the following question raises a good question. The contestants where Ken, Jerry, Jennifer. In Double Jeopardy there was a category  Biblical Name The Same. The clue was three last names (e.g., Driver, Sandler, West ) and the correct response is a biblical name that is the first name of people with that last name ( Adam : Adam Driver, Adam Sandler, Adam West). What happened with Biblical Name The ...

Rescue quantum procrastinators by letting them prove their chronological superiority to a quantum attacker. Rescue quantum procrastinators by letting them prove their chronological superiority to a quantum attacker.

by Aarti Laddha , Richard Diaz-Cool , Rishika Idnani , Venkatesh Selveraj Netflix supports a vast and evolving set of features and content types, ranging from 4K streaming and immersive audio to live streaming and cloud gaming, across a diverse ecosystem of devices. However, not all devices are created equal. Hardware limitations such as available RAM, CPU cores, display capabilities, or platform support mean that some features cannot be supported on certain device models. To ensure the best...

There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face . This prompted Anthropic to check what their models were up to and, to my complete lack of surprise, discovered three incidents where models had gained unauthorized access to data in other organizations. Simon Wilison concluded : It’s abundantly clear now that running evals of cyberattack potential in models is a spectacularly risky business. Every AI lab needs to pay attention to ...

I wrote ryg_rans in 2014. I still regularly get questions and patch submissions from people who want to use it as a library. That is not what it’s for! ryg_rans is not a library, never was. It’s a toy implementation of an algorithm whose core fits in something like 20 lines of code. It’s the equivalent of the wooden board you sometimes see in hardware stores where they have 30 different types and sizes of fasteners screwed, bolted or nailed in. The idea is not that you should use th...

In Physics simulations or game engines it’s sometimes useful to determine the speed with which two objects are approaching each other. This post will discuss the concept of closing speed , which is the normal component of the relative velocity of two objects. Relative velocity and its components Suppose we have objects A and B [1] with velocity vectors \vec{V_A} and \vec{V_B} . The relative velocity of B w.r.t. A is: \[\vec{V}_{B|A}=\vec{V}_B-\vec{V}_A\] Put differently, ...

Remember me? It’s been a while, I know.  My last blog post went up here on February 19.   The posts that came after were made by my mighty minions.   I am lucky enough to have a great staff of assistants… though even with their help, I kept falling further and further behind. This year has been… stressful, to say the least.   So much has been happening, it’s been overwhelming.   Some great things, exciting things.  Dreams coming true.  But there have been nightmares too. ...

During the heyday of AT&T, it was often said that the telephone system was the largest machine ever built. The "hello machine" certainly was vast, but whether or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of definition. The Internet, I think we can all agree, is not a single machine but a system of interconnected ones. The telephone network, though, felt a lot more like one device. "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" was once the slogan of AT&T, a message tha...

The Creation of the World, by Ivan Aivazovsky, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, industrial technology. This week we look at pepper-spray drones, China’s chip Manhattan Project, Commonwealth Fusion’s fundraise, and a proposed Dulles Airport renovation. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities It’s been a while since we checked in on 3D p...

Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol. For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024...

I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backups at around 1 GB/sec. But... I want more . I upgraded my rack and my NAS to 25 GbE a couple years ago, and wanted to upgrade my main workstation, too. I've been using the built-in 10 Gigabit Ethernet on my Mac Studio for a few years. It works fine: I can edit 4K video straight off my NAS over the network, and run backup...

Who knows how reality will continue to develop? There’s no way to prepare. When you can’t be prepared, be prepared to find poetry in the chaos. Secret messages, serendipitous grace, lines of meaning in a whirlwind of uncertainty. “It's gonna change, baby doll It's gonna change, honey ball It's gonna change, sugar cane It's gonna change, sweetie legs.” —Yoko Ono This is a test but so is everything. Everyone is watching you and everyone will judge you and you have to make p...

On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An internal AI model — one not available to the public — had come up with a counterexample to the “unit distance” problem, a conjecture made in 1946 by Paul Erdős, the prolific, itinerant Hungarian mathematician. Erdős posed thousands of questions, but this one was special: It was both simple to explain and… Source On May 20, 2026, OpenAI made an announcement that shook the mathematical world. An inter...

Marcus Hutter —oldheads will remember him from AIXI —recently published a book: Job-Less Utopia: Macroeconomics in the Age of AGI . I’m always curious what the people building AI think or want the future to look like, and I’m also always looking for non-doomer takes on the post-AGI future, so I decided to read it and review it. The first thing to say is that nearly every sentence is written by AI. To his credit, Hutter says so plainly: Claude also served as the most dilige...

C++26 adds a new container to the standard library: std::hive . It is meant to occupy the ground between std::vector and std::list . Like a vector, it keeps its elements in contiguous blocks of memory, so scanning it does not require you to chase a pointer for every element. Like a list, it never moves an element once it has been inserted: your pointers, references and iterators stay valid, and you may erase any element in constant time without disturbing the others. Internally, a hive is ...

Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to focus on the code, while their manager figures out who’s doing well and rewards them. This attitude is an extension of the “school fantasy”: the idea that your workplace should operate by the same rules as your school or university. After all, you didn’t have to worry about “visibility” during your education. You simply did the assignments and tests you w...

Forking tsc to support Go's defer. Forking tsc to support Go's defer.

0.0 Context Setting Friday, 31 July 2026 in Portland Oregon, after I just finished today’s show with Russell. Of which, well, that’s the thing that caught my attention. 0.1 Events: How People Work, Live! All show all the time, I guess? Next one’s with Dylan Wilbanks -- register, check out the schedule, and watch previous shows on the show page . That’s a lot of the word show all at once. 1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 Organizational Entropy, Activation Energy...